In a matter of three days, Slate published five different articles with name misspellings. The names included Edgar Allan Poe's middle name, Kanye West's first name among others.
It's astonishing to think that one organization could allow so many misspellings at all, and even more so in such a short period of time. It's not like I can even blame the stresses of trying to break news and these stories had to be rushed. Multiple authors at the same organization all made the same mistake, name misspellings. What this shows me is that there's a lack of attention to detail at Slate that needs to be fixed and fixed fast. Because if Slate slips up on small details like names, how can we know that they won't mess up bigger facts down the road?
So I pose the question, does online journalism in general not take enough editorial steps to avoid things like misspellings? What do organizations need to do to make sure this doesn't happen?
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/regret-the-error/172065/slate-had-some-issues-with-misspelled-names-last-week/
This is really funny at first, but kind of sad. Just because it's online, doesn't mean that whatever material you are publishing is less important. In fact, it's kind of like the new print medium because it's a lot cheaper than actually printing off paper. If anyone wants to be taken seriously, at least take the time it takes to spell names correctly. That's journalism 101...well 201 for Maryland students.
ReplyDeleteI definitely notice more small spelling and grammatical errors in online news pieces than I do in other media. I think that still news organizations treat the internet as an after thought. They put all of their attention and focus into their main outlet and often try to upload web content quickly without much thought. One way an organization could help prevent this would be to make sure that an editor looks over all online content. As a journalist it can be easy, especially if you're in a hurry, to make a small spelling mistake. It's always helpful to have that extra set of eyes look things over before it's too late.
ReplyDeleteI think these kind of errors are a result of layoffs (of copy editors in particular) and being overwhelmed in the newsroom. Without enough people to look over stories before they are published online — whether they are web developers, editors or the reporters themselves — errors will inevitably slip through the cracks. Journalists deal with massive workloads all the time, always feeling like they never have enough time to report a story to its fullest or write enough text to do justice to a particularly interesting topic. This is exacerbated when newsrooms aren't fully staffed, and everyone feels stretched thin. Less eyes + less time those eyes spend on each story = more errors.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, journalists are now expected to do more than ever in the same amount of time. On top of everything associated with traditional reporting — conducting the interviews and writing the copy — they might be asked to shoot video, write up short online versions, snap and edit photos...etc, etc. With all these extra duties, some things take a backseat. Say it's five minutes until deadline, and you're expected to turn in a finished text version as well as several edited photos with cutlines. You have time to either double check the spellings of all the proper names or get to the photos, but not both. Which do you think you'll choose?
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ReplyDeleteI love Slate and I cannot believe they were so careless in their editing. They have a lot of intelligent people in staff who really care about their work and about the state of the journalism industry. I have to say I think this was a coincidence and maybe they just had a bad week? Five name misspellings within a week is a lot, but I just feel like some other forces had to be at work against the careful journalists at Slate!
ReplyDeleteThey do hace relatively few employees though, so I'm not sure what their editing system is like. I believe they are owned by WaPo so they may be also having budget issues... just adding insult to injury
Mali, you love Slate? Who knew...
ReplyDeleteAnyway, even though the stories weren't "breaking news" I still think there's a constant, unceasing threat of deadline for online writers, which sometimes causes careless errors to slip though. On local affiliate news station sites, I often see grammatical ones--even an article that was missing two periods. I think it's easier to rush through editing something online because of the sheer volume of articles present on the site that need to be uploaded and maintained, with the comments section moderated...it can be a huge and daunting task. Also, as noted by some of my peers above, web reporters have to keep up with a variety of other tasks in addition to writing their story. Overall, it is easy for me to understand these errors and not hold Slate too accountable. Misspellings may lead to greater factual errors, yes, but misspellings are also small errors and can fly under the radar, so to speak. For now I will trust that Slate is still putting out accurate, albeit poorly edited, stories.
It seems that in the 24-hour news world, accuracy is simply being pushed aside as reporters focus their attention on speed and being first. I constantly see grammatical errors in many of the articles I read now and messing up names as the above article suggests is just bad journalism.
ReplyDeleteI, for one, would hate to have my byline on an article in which names are constantly misspelled because it makes the reporter look like an idiot and readers not want to continue reading.
When I think of spelling mistakes of names the first thing that comes to mind is the F I got when I spelled the name of an American city incorrectly in my 201 class and I think the editors of Slate deserve an F for that too. I think that by spelling a name incorrectly you lose a lot of credibility - especially for names like Edgar Allan Poe or Kanye West that are easily googleable and just common sense it just makes you look bad.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly I have read back some of the posts I have published on Discovery websites and realized that some of my sentences were very poorly formatted. Sometimes when you just write something you have an idea of what you've written down that you don't even see some of your errors when you read it back right after. One of the things I have learned is to always read what you write out loud and then you really know if something sounds good or not.
The writers at Slate probably wanted to publish immediately and did not take enough care in reading back their article.